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Crimson and Green

IN THEORY A tour group at Harvard Yard in July.Credit
Darren McCollester/Getty Images

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

WILLIAM FITZSIMMONS had never seen so many expensive clothes in his life. It was the fall of 1963, the first day of his freshman year at Harvard, and the blue-collar scholarship student from Boston found himself agape, and angered, by a campus teeming with tweed and Top-Siders.

“There was an overwhelming sense of affluence, and it was really reflected in the dress styles,” Mr. Fitzsimmons recalled last week at his office here, where he now oversees admissions and financial aid at his alma mater. “I was stunned to see people sockless in the winter.”

Mr. Fitzsimmons entered Harvard at a time when its class lines were starkly drawn, and he has spent much of his 23 years as admissions dean helping the place become more welcoming to outsiders like himself. More than 60 percent of undergraduates now receive financial aid, and blazers are no longer required.

So more than a few brainy Cambridge brows began to furrow last month after word trickled out that Harvard had entered into a 10-year licensing agreement for a line of preppy clothing modeled after the type that Mr. Fitzsimmons encountered four decades ago. A New England patchwork of tartan, seersucker and old-school plaids, the collection is to arrive in national department stores beginning in February, under the name Harvard Yard.

There will be no Veritas seals or emblazoned ‘H’s. Instead, the designers at Wearwolf, a Manhattan-based private company that created the line, will add crimson-thread buttonholes and collar details, a subtle nod to their sartorial inspiration. Oxford shirts start at $165, and sports coats run to $495. The company declined to discuss its projected sales figures.

“It’s a modern rendition of a classic American heritage,” said John Fowler, the creative director. “We want to combine the power of Harvard with the power of a plaid shirt.”

It’s nothing new for the university to profit on branded clothing; any tourist in Harvard Square can pick up a JanSport hoodie for $30 or so. But, given a history of wealth and exclusion, prep at Harvard comes with its own set of complex connotations.

“Every move to paste the Harvard name on symbols of prosperity, wealth, privilege and class erects a subtle, insidious ‘Members Only’ sign at the university admissions office,” Peter M. Conti-Brown, a 2005 graduate, said in an e-mail message.

Mr. Conti-Brown served as the undergraduate director of an extensive outreach effort by the admissions office to broaden Harvard’s appeal to students from poorer backgrounds.

The barriers were often psychological, Mr. Conti-Brown recalled. “We were going up against 400 years of history,” he said. “Without a doubt, licensing preppy clothes with the Harvard brand is a move in the opposite direction.”

The university, for its part, appears to be growing tired of the attention. “Oh joy, rapture,” a spokesman, John Longbrake, said when informed about the subject of this article.

He disputed the idea that a preppy, Harvard-branded clothing line would diminish the university’s efforts to appeal to students of diverse backgrounds. “A single licensing agreement out of more than 100 apparel agreements has no bearing on those efforts,” he wrote in an e-mail message.

He noted that Harvard began licensing its name for clothing in the 1980s, in part to help raise funds for financial aid, and that such deals now generate about $500,000 a year in revenue.

The columnist Michael Kinsley, who was was a keen observer of Harvard’s culture during his undergraduate days in the early 1970s, said that he found the whole business astonishing.

Photo

Harvard Medical School backed away from a policy requiring students to get approval before speaking to the news media.Credit
Jodi Hilton for The New York Times

“I know that Harvard is hard up after last year (though only in comparison to Harvard in other years), but this seems absurd,” Mr. Kinsley wrote in an e-mail message, referring to the 30 percent drop in the university’s endowment. “How much money is it bringing in, and will it even equal whatever the admissions office spends trying to correct the very misimpression that this arrangement reinforces?”

No one at the university was willing to disclose the exact monetary benefits of the deal, except to emphasize that the revenue would go exclusively toward financial aid.

A ramble through Harvard Yard this week, as students returned for a new academic year, revealed more bow ties, polo shirts and Lacoste crocodiles than one might find on the average college campus. (Full disclosure: this reporter is a recent graduate who occasionally wears boat shoes.) But for the most part, today’s Harvard students dress however they like. The usual hoodies, jeans and flip-flops are common.

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“Most of the time, people are way too stressed out to change out of their sweatpants,” said Tim Olds, 21, a senior English major, who said he arrived at Harvard with the $2 T-shirts he’d been wearing since high school. (His girlfriend, who attends the Fashion Institute of Technology, later insisted that they be thrown out.)

Mr. Olds recalled that he was initially taken aback by the more formal aesthetic among his peers. “There’s always one kid in Ec 10 who will wear the suit everyday,” Mr. Olds said, referring to Harvard’s introductory economics course, considered a boot camp for Wall Street.

Upscale clothing is to be expected at a school where the average household income trends toward $200,000. “It does represent something that is real on campus; there are still clubs that have pig roasts at the Harvard-Yale game and stuff,” said Sarah Wick, a senior. (She noted that her own dress cost $19.)

“I was asked if I had to wear a uniform to go here,” said Robert Tamai, a freshman from Hawaii, who was wearing a T-shirt and athletic shorts. His roommate, Denny Purcell of New York, admitted to feeling “a little intimidated” when he first arrived. “Some people are dressed really good,” he said warily.

Some students played down the significance of the licensing deal. In an editorial last week, The Harvard Crimson wrote that criticism of the line was unwarranted: “It is misguided to blame the university for doing what it can to pay its bills, even if that means allowing Harvard’s name to adorn crimson-lined blazers and madras shorts reminiscent of the 1950s ‘good-old-boy’ era.”

Robert Corty, a senior studying biology, agreed. “I think it’s good that it’s doing something to make money,” he said, sporting a lemon-yellow Ralph Lauren polo shirt, blue shorts and tan boat shoes. He said the style represented by the clothing line “is more of a stereotype and less of a reality.”

Indeed, even on a campus where tradition looms large, students expressed the sense that the clothing line was playing off a manufactured nostalgia, a romantic notion of a Harvard that never quite existed. “Who is that for? People who liked ‘Love Story’ and want to dress like the characters?” asked Eduardo Azevedo, a graduate student in economics.

Experts in the field of prep agreed.

“Harvard was never the most preppy!” said Lisa Birnbach, who put together “The Official Preppy Handbook” (Workman Publishing, 1980), on the telephone from her home in Manhattan. “It probably was when it was the first college in America. But ever since the 70s, it’s been hippie-ish, it’s been diverse. It had Radcliffe, and truly, the preppiest of the Ivy League did not have girls.”

Ms. Birnbach said that even if the styles of the line outwardly conform to preppy standards, its blatant commercialism runs against the entire ethos.

“It’s not correct that preppies want the newest and the best. Many a preppy is a cheapskate anyway,” she said, noting that prep outfits are often salvaged from the lost-and-found bin at the country club, rather than picked up off-the-rack at the mall.

Mr. Olds, the English major, said he did not mind the licensing deal as long as it went for student aid. He said his education in Cambridge has been virtually free; the university bought him a laptop and provides an annual $100 stipend for winter coats.

“If it takes a clothing line to get all this stuff done, I’m O.K. with that,” he said.

And at the nearby J. Press boutique, where acres of Shetland wool sweaters implied the annual yield of an entire Scottish sheep farm, the staff members did not seem too concerned about their new rival.

“We’ve been in business since 1902; there are many names that have come and gone,” said Denis Black, the general manager, with the confidence of a man who once got a personal thank-you note from Bill Clinton for picking out a tie. “Saying something is a Harvard jacket or a Yale jacket doesn’t make it so.”